An Open Map: The Correspondence of Robert Duncan and Charles Olson

Recencies Series

by Robert J. Bertholf (Editor), Dale M. Smith (Editor)

The correspondence of Robert Duncan and Charles Olson is one of the foundational literary exchanges of twentieth-century American poetry. The 130 letters collected in this volume begin in 1947 just after the two poets first meet in Berkeley, California, and continue to Olson's death in January 1970. Both men initiated a novel stance toward poetry, and they matched each other with huge accomplishments, an enquiring, declarative intelligence, wide-ranging interests in history and occult literature, and the urgent demand to be a poet. More than a literary correspondence, An Open Map gives insight into an essential period of poetic advancement in cultural history.

328 pages, Hardcover

Published December 15, 2017

Reviews

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's remarkable stuff here, especially on Duncan's side. At some point in 1954-1955, Duncan, aware that Olson was at Black Mountain, and perhaps wishing to teach there himself (in Spring-Summer 1956 he did), began to put a lot into the correspondence with Olson, and overall I would say that the Duncan material here doubles in page-count the Olson. In 1965-1967 Olson's health failed (his second wife died in 1964; then he had a heart attack on a trip to Berlin in 1966). Once the College was closed, in 1957, there was a brief moment of renaissance in San Francisco, akin to the Berkeley Renaissance that had flared between 1947-1952 under the influence of Kantorowicz, the medievalist whose humanism transformed Duncan, Blaser, and Spicer; the Beats had come to SF, all the Black Mountain students made their way there in the fall 1956, and then in late '57 Kerouac published On the Road and all the world came to San Francisco. Olson had already been there, delivering his Whitehead lectures. Suddenly, the Beats were marketable, the Grove Press editor, Donald Allen, began to put together his anthology of American experimental work, that included Ginsberg and the Beats -- The New American Poetry (1960). What to call this assembly of young writers influenced by Olson's Black Mountain? Thus was born the "Black Mountain Poetries" -- a "school" of poetry. This was not completely out of Duncan's design. Olson dismissed the project, but Duncan thought of himself as a coterie poet, and his friendships with Olson, Creeley, and Levertov all seem to have been accompanied by many letters.